By Ross Cristantiello
Harvard Medical School will no longer participate in the annual “best medical schools” survey and rankings conducted by U.S. News & World Report. The move was announced by Dean of the Faculty of Medicine George Daly in a letter published Tuesday.
Daly’s decision and the concerns that prompted it “rest on the principled belief that rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs,” he said in the letter.
In the 2023 medical school rankings, Harvard Medical School was ranked first for research and ninth for primary care.
Daly said that he has been contemplating this decision since he became dean six years ago, but was compelled to act by the actions of Harvard Law School and other notable law schools.
Harvard and Yale law schools announced in November that they would no longer be participating in the rankings. This was a major blow to the U.S. News rankings, which has published influential lists of the country’s colleges and universities for years. The rankings are meant to help students “narrow their college search,” but critics have raised concerns about the outlet’s methodology and the very idea of numerically ranking higher education institutions.
“As unintended consequences, rankings create perverse incentives for institutions to report misleading or inaccurate data, set policies to boost rankings rather than nobler objectives, or divert financial aid from students with financial need to high-scoring students with means in order to maximize ranking criteria,” Daly said in the letter.
The suitability of any medical school is “too complex, nuanced, and individualized to be served by a rigid ranked list, no matter the methodology,” Daly continued.
Daly instead pointed prospective students toward the Medical School Admission Requirements (MSAR) Reports for Applicants and Advisors, which presents comparable school data in a “raw, unweighted form.”
To rank medical schools, U.S. News uses “faculty resources, the academic achievements of entering students and qualitative assessments by schools and residency directors.”
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